1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to the field of exchanging messages on computer networks such as the Internet.
2. Description of Related Art
Social networking on the Internet began with the advent of e-mail, continued with the development of Usenet (online bulletin boards), Web posting networks, including blogs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and other interactive chat systems, and has since evolved into what has been termed “walled gardens”: distinct online communities whose participants are typically paying members who are given access to the resources of the community for the purpose of engaging in social discourse with other members. Resources include the means of posting and viewing photos and videos, messaging with other members, posting comments, and so on. Facebook, MySpace and the various online dating sites, such as Match.com and Yahoo! Personals, are examples of social networks. Members of a given community generally cannot interact with members of other online communities without becoming a member of the other community, hence the term “walled garden”.
Some communities, such as many of the online dating sites, are used primarily as filters: members provide a set of personal data, such as age, sex, occupation, income, hobbies, etc., as well as search criteria and the site matches personal—with search criteria, sending e-mail of the various “matches”, along with a relative ranking of each match, to their members. The matching and ranking are done at the site and the member receives the results in an e-mail message.
The above messaging scheme maintains the “walled garden” paradigm in its dependence or the site for providing the matching and ranking, as well as a lack of interoperability with other, similar sites. Furthermore, the scheme has a static nature to it: once a message is received, changes in the search criteria by the recipient do not result in ranking changes in messages which had already been sent: one's only option is to submit the changes in the search criteria to the site and wait for it to perform filtering and, perhaps, send some new matches. Worse yet, the recipient of a message indicating, say, a high percentage of commonality between his or her search criteria and another member's personal data, usually has no way of knowing exactly where the commonality is without making extra effort. Also, the categories which make up the filters are fixed; the user has no latitude in creating or propagating his or her search categories.
Among social networks as a whole, one common shortcoming stands out: namely, the inability of the network to provide a mapping of message sender characteristics with message viewer filters. In the case of Usenet, one invention, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,269, attempted to alleviate this shortcoming. However, the invention only applied to Usenet and did not provide any level of privacy to the message sender's characteristics. The present invention provides the mapping described for messages sent anywhere in the entire Internet and is applicable to a broad class of social networks.